Should Faye End Her Relationship with Ash?

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You know when you were a little kid and all you wanted to do was grow up? Yeah, that changes when you hit sophomore year of college. Now I’d really like it if time could just stop… or at least slow down a little bit.

Grownup stuff is not fun. Do you want to know what we did at my apartment this weekend? We totaled our grocery receipts. We spent $400 for 6 weeks’ worth of food for 3 people. I have no idea if this is good or not.

Another thing that grownup sophomore engineering students have to worry about: co-op. If you’ve never heard of co-op before, it’s mainly for engineers and what you do is alternate school and working for 3 semesters. So co-op fall, school spring, co-op summer, school fall, co-op spring, school until you graduate, usually a semester late. The thing is, getting a co-op is like getting a job. You need to write a resume and a cover letter and go to interviews and wear pant suits! There is so much unpleasantness in that last exclamation it needs bullet points.

-Writing a resume: Remember all those awesome things you did in high school. Those don’t count anymore. Unless you did something huge in high school, your college resume starts with day 1 from freshman year. And if you’re like me and 90% of the college population, you don’t have much filler. I’m in a few clubs, have a few scholarships, and wrote a paper for my class, but that’s about it. Use a big font.

-Writing a cover letter: Slightly better than writing a resume, but still not my idea of a fun Sunday afternoon.

-Interviews: GAH! Talking…to other human beings…like a human being. It really doesn’t help that whenever I talk to someone I consider an “authority figure” my body’s natural response is the same as the one it uses if someone just punched me in the face. My voice gets hoarse, my eyes start to water, and my brain keeps thinking up ways to get me out of the room as fast as possible.

-Pant suits: I actually like dressing up all professional. This one’s not so bad.

Anyway, what prompted this whole thought progression in the first place is the fact that I have to write an essay about my 5-year career plan. That got me thinking about that fact that I don’t have a 5-year career plan, let alone a 5-week career plan, and OMG I’m only a sophomore, I don’t know anything about anything yet.

Then that got me thinking about Ash, and where our relationship stands in this whole “5 year plan.” We’ve been dating for almost 9 months now and everything’s great, but I can’t help but feel that our career paths are taking us in completely different directions. My end goal is to wind up in Orlando, Florida—working at the sunniest, warmest, happiest place on earth. And Ash…. he wants to stay up north, maybe get a job back home or some other place WAY far away from Disney. I know all that’s 2, probably 3 years off, but if I wind up getting a co-op at Disney (fingers crossed), that’s 3 semesters that we’ll be thousands of miles away from each other. And even with my misguided overly romanticized view of true love and happily ever after, I’m not going to plan my future around the hope that we’ll stay together. I don’t expect him to plan his future around me, either.

So where does that leave us? I don’t want to break up, that’s for sure. I can’t imagine what it would be like without Ash—no more lunch dates, watching stupid movies, cuddling up together, holding hands. But there are two ends to our relationship—either we break up sometime in the eventual future, or we stay together…forever (until death do you part). And that’s a scary thought.

And now, Sparklers, I burden you with the task of figuring out what I should do. My current plan is to shove all this to the back of my mind where the far-off problems and my ability to do simple algebra have taken up permanent residence. Is this a good plan? I’m as sure about that as I am about whether or not we paid too much for groceries.